Opscientia

Opscientia is a decentralized autonomous organization that is catalyzing the pace of scientific discovery. Today progress is limited by centralized systems that restrict global access to study participation, research funding, scientific collaboration, and knowledge creation. Current digital infrastructure does not support interoperability and automation for real-world applications and is not engineered with self-sovereign, user-control of personal data as a first principle. 

Opscientia’s decentralized science stack is the first and most ambitious solution to compete with these restrictive systems.  Participants are incentivized to take part in studies whilst retaining full ownership and control of their data, and first-claim rights to convert this into an economic asset through decentralized finance. Scientists are also incentivized to share data and collaborate globally. We close the digital inclusion gap for researchers and participants across the globe while enabling citizens to become shareholders vested in scientific progress.

The data economy is unilaterally cornered by international tech monopolies. Privacy concerns limit research participants' trust and strengthen institutional data silos, locking away exabytes of information on the planet, human activity, and observations of the universe. The current state of data sharing and scientific collaboration is characterized by isolated clusters of knowledge creators operating in independent ignorance; where information is abundant, yet concentrated amongst a few, and knowledge is an asset of the privileged. 

The current digital economy is unsustainable for equitable long-term global growth because it locks away mechanisms of new value creation by design. The trend of big tech dominance will increase the digital inclusion gap because, 1) data ownership rests with companies, not creators, 2) profits generated from this data go to big tech, not the rightful owners, 3) data is siloed by elitist institutions and not accessible as a public good, 4) data is not interoperable for machine readability, 5) analytical models do not produce reliable results in production, and 6) scientific insights from data are not available to support the innovation required for action on global challenges.

Opscientia has designed a community-owned digital platform for automated scientific experiments to capture the economic value of knowledge generation and empower global citizens as data shareholders of scientific progress. Powering this platform is our Decentralized Science (DeSci) Stack, a software development kit linking decentralized finance with data markets, privacy-preserving cloud services, and the power of smart contracts to coordinate global citizen science communities around a collectively determined incentive structure. 

Our platform onboards users with a decentralized identity, DID, granting credentials to sign, verify, and interact with tokenized data objects. A limited selection of data objects that comply with dataset specification standards and fair-use licenses may be tokenized using the platform, allowing users to specify streaming fees, object metadata, links to other objects, and permissions for use. 

The platform possesses a governance utility token for incentive alignment, encouraging users to consume and contribute data, review models, and publish tokenized insights and predictions. Decentralized marketplaces power tradeable datasets, models, predictions, and insights. A small public goods fee is set aside for each royalty event to fund data bounties and proposals evaluated by governance token-holding participants. For the first time, value generated by scientific enterprise can be in the hands of a global community.

Our platform utilizes a digital identity system running on decentralized smart contracts to bring together a global community of scientists, patients, science enthusiasts, and research institutions to securely share data, methods, and insights. 

Research participants and patients currently have limited control over who uses their data once it is collected and shared, relying on institutions to warden ethical use of their data. Patient communities and special-interest groups do not get a direct say on the use of data for research that directly affects their lives because they do not have sovereignty over the data they provide.

Granting research participants full control over how their data is used is a fundamental revolution in human subjects research. For the first time, participants can consent in and out of a study in real-time, grant or revoke permissions to specific groups, and use this power to meaningfully engage in public discourse over the use of data to pursue scientific knowledge. Our native plug-in with decentralized financial protocols also means research participants can benefit from converting data into liquid assets, earning yield on financial services built on top of valuable datasets. Participants can choose to collect this income or reinvest it into research projects they are interested in. 

Our solution provides an asymmetrical benefit to marginalized populations that offer up their data with little to no compensation. For example, refugee groups are subject to exceptional scrutiny by public health, social scientists, and public policy researchers. Identification is a given in developed countries with well-functioning civic systems. Migrants, undocumented individuals, refugees, or other global citizens that do not have the privilege of being born at the right place at the right time do not have access to basic civic services that are a prerequisite for them to cross borders, access healthcare, apply for a job or education, rent a home, etc. A digital research identity solution can plug and play with upcoming systems such as the EU Self Sovereign Identity (SSI) framework and provide a verifiable credential to allow migrants and displaced persons to present proof of identity and receive social services while participating in research critical to understand and identify issues within specific marginalized groups.

On the other side of the coin, the absence of a comprehensive digital identity system for scientific research also places an exceptional administrative burden on researchers and institutions, taking time and money away from research. Scientists must use limited grant funds to pay for access to valuable datasets and recruit research participants, cloud services to store and share massive amounts of data, and the unfortunate privilege to waive intellectual property rights to publish their research. Our platform brings research participants and scientists together while providing an infrastructure for secure cloud storage on decentralized servers that are not subject to censorship or any single country’s jurisdiction. Scientists that have earned the trust of research participants can curate valuable datasets, control their permissions for sharing with collaborators, and use the proceeds of dataset consumption generated by Opscientia’s decentralized data marketplace to fund their research. And most importantly, our implementation of blockchain technology allows researchers to notarise their ideas at the time of invention through hypothesis pre-registration, simultaneously encouraging reproducible science practices and ensuring proper attribution of intellectual property.

Opscientia is currently conducting user research by engaging with scientists at hack-a-thons, conferences, and informal meetups to understand technological barriers to adoption and develop a self-sustaining incentive model that will survive long into the future. We plan to partner with up to 10 research labs and launch a series of crowdsourced data collection campaigns and collect vital information from research participant stakeholders to fine-tune our incentive model.

Eventually, we anticipate our products will impact all global citizens that relinquish their personal data for access to web services that can be used to fuel the engine of scientific discovery. Using COVID-19 as a case study, we can see that when incentives are aligned and communication channels are open, we can make astronomical scientific progress in a short period of time. Our decentralized science stack decreases the threshold for achieving the required level of trust for meaningful scientific collaboration. Opscientia will apply this perk to catalyze a new wave of global innovation in science, technology, education, and mathematics.

Opscientia's decentralized science stack leverages digital identity, public smart contract blockchains, and decentralized finance to empower data providers and knowledge creators with full control of their digital assets. For the first time, scientists and research participants can own their data as a liquid asset that can earn yield in the decentralized finance ecosystem. Our services are permission-less and open to global participation, empowering the inclusion of traditionally marginalized populations as equal-opportunity participants in the digital data economy. Furthermore, our stack enables scientists globally to work together to solve some of the world's most difficult problems.

We are in month 6 of our roadmap to build a Decentralised Autonomous Organisation (DAO) powered by the DeSci Stack prototype. We currently host a community of over 50 scientists, hackers, and enthusiasts. We utilize this community to help us test our business plan. We also built and tested a prototype solution at the invite-only ETHGlobal Web3Weekend hackathon and won two prizes for this. We are also testing it among the community at Kernel, which is an invite-only program for top tech talent looking to build relationships, products, and companies in the blockchain and Web 3.

Our solution is the very first attempt to build a decentralized science community running on public smart contract blockchains to achieve self-sustainability through data self-sovereignty and data marketplaces running on decentralized financial services. 

We are innovating on several problems, including but not limited to:

1. Currently, data is siloed and extracted by those with the means to store it from those who create it. 
2. Patients participating in research have limited say over how their data is used to solve health challenges. We empower patients with the right to grant or revoke access to their data by researchers that may or may not have an aligned vision.
3. Data provenance and data lineage are poor in science. We aim to create a transparent and open pipeline to empower those who take part.
4. The culture of science is broken. Highly specialized knowledge creators are currently treated as disposal labor, at great cost to society. We are providing community-owned digital spaces for knowledge creators to express their creativity and contribute to society. 
5. We also aim to shift the culture of science to design a value-add system. This will ultimately speed up the scientific discovery process and empower people all over the world to collaborate on shared problems, helping remove location privilege.
6. For the first time, researchers can raise funding to crowdsource data collection from global populations, avoiding bias in research studies that have wide-reaching consequences.

Our solution currently serves a small community of 50 researchers, hackers, and science enthusiasts. 

In 18 months, we expect to scale our solution to 10,000 research participants completing data bounties hosted by 10 research labs. We expect to extend our decentralized cloud services to 5 research centers, and 1 academic institution.

In five years, we expect to scale to 1,000,000 research participants, 10,000 research labs, and 500 research centers across 100 academic institutions. At this milestone, we will have achieved the collection of the largest high-quality public datasets used to generate never-before achieved insights on human decision making, social activity, and health.

We self-appraise with how wide we've serviced the needs of those most at risk, in bytes of reclaimed personal data, inactivity on our exchanges, and total profits shared across our communities.

We measure our impact with:

• the number of global citizens engaged in public discourse on the direction of scientific inquiry
• the number of research projects successfully crowdfunded and completed, 
• the exchange volume on our data marketplaces, 
• the number of citations of research projects launched on our platform,
• the offset of academic jobs attrition
• in cumulative dollars saved in publication costs, cloud services, and research data management
• in the attenuation of the environmental impact of non-reproducible research  data collection and models for artificial intelligence and machine learning

We have a total of three full-time and three part-time core team staff. We have sponsored two undergraduate research summer fellowships and contracted a graphic designer. We have plans to contract additional fellows, community growth managers, and content creators.

The Opscientia core team is a flat hierarchy (no executives) of neuroscientists, software developers, social impact activists, and business development specialists. 

Shady El Damaty, Ph.D. was born in Egypt, immigrated to the U.S. for education, and now founder and product manager for Opscientia's decentralised science stack. He has an extensive quantitative background contributing to methods development and digital infrastructure for neuroscience research.

Sarah Hamburg, Ph.D. is a neuroscientist and product strategist from the U.K. with years of experience in human neuroimaging, user experience research, and product development.

Alexandra McCarroll, M.Sc. (in proc) is a full-stack engineer from Hong Kong, the U.K., and the U.S. that has served critical roles in start-ups and corporations. Her diverse background makes her suited to manage a variety of technical challenges.

Daniel Byington, M.Sc. is a business development specialist from the U.S. with a rich background in market research for drug development.

Miri Rossitto is the CEO of COWE communications and Opscientia's brand management strategist from the U.S. with 10 years of experience consulting and advising successful start-ups.

Liliana Muscarella, M.A., is Opscientia's social impact strategist from the U.S. and brings four years of research experience on policy programs for humanitarian aid at the United Nations, with USAID, and NGOs.

Achintya Kumar, is Opscientia's Open Web Fellow from India and is applying his web development skills to build the DeSci stack.

Kinshuk Kashyap, is Opscientia's Google Summer of Code Fellow from India that was awarded a competitive summer fellowship to contribute to the DeSci Stack.

Opscientia was established as a DAO/LLC hybrid, where the core team is employed through the legal entity to serve as stewards to nurture the growth of the Opscientia Decentralized Autonomous Organization (DAO), a distributed community of knowledge creators, participants, community coordinators, and data/knowledge consumers.

In the spirit of decentralization, the Opscientia Core team follows a flat hierarchy with majority voting consensus used to inform decision-making. There are no CEOs or executive officers in the company structure, only functional roles that serve to grow the DAO.

We are executing a roadmap to progressively decentralize and automate low-level decision-making, and in time the reins will be passed on to the community who will decide how the DAO is run and parameters of the data marketplace determined. Eventually, we expect that traditional executive officer positions, such as treasury management, will be run by automated smart contracts and governed by a formal decision-making process.

Opscientia is wholeheartedly committed to employing and working with knowledge creators and decentralized science enthusiasts from all over the globe. Our core team is majority women, and we plan to continue this trend. 

We also actively seek to remove location privilege and reverse brain drain by employing and identifying talent in nonwestern countries in Asia, Africa, and South America.

Opscientia’s mission since inception has been to revolutionize how we as a society capture the value generated through data and data transactions by utilizing decentralized technologies that reward the actual user instead of the centralized service provider. It was serendipity that our goals aligned so closely with the Digital Inclusion Challenge. 

We are applying to the Solve competition to take Opscientia to the next level: the grant and investment funding will help us bridge legal, market, and cultural barriers by providing a platform for our call to action to Decentralize Science for Good. Furthermore, because we are building a decentralized community the access to like-minded peers, mentors, and investors will accelerate the snowball process and enable Opscientia to overcome the size threshold of self-sufficiency.

Opscientia is composed of a core team that follows a flat hierarchy as we nurture the growth of a decentralized autonomous science organization. We are seeking a platform for our call to action and build momentum through community engagement. 

We are currently actively filling talent roles for the core team and require an amplifier so our call is heard more widely. Our ability to establish a thriving community is strongly dependent on the diversity of the creativity and minds we can encourage to participate in our fight to democratize knowledge creation.

Our solution is at the bleeding edge of distributed ledger technology and we require sharp, creative, nonconventional minds to join and aid us perform game theoretic simulations for incentive alignment, token engineering, and disruptive financial models that are unlike anything seen before - where the metric of performance is the quality and volume of inclusive knowledge creation.

• International Neuroinformatics Consortium Framework
• MIT Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences
• Massachusetts General Hospital Neuromaging Lab
• MIT Media Lab
• Online Privacy Alliance
• Civic Design Data Lab
• Internet Society Foundation
• Decentralized Identity Foundation
• European Self-Sovereign Identity Framework
• Mozilla Foundation
• IBM Blockchain

Our solution provides an asymmetrical benefit to marginalized populations that offer up their data with little to no compensation. For example, refugee groups are subject to exceptional scrutiny by public health, social scientists, and public policy researchers. Identification is a given in developed countries with well-functioning civic systems. Migrants, undocumented individuals, refugees, or other global citizens that do not have the privellege of being born at the right place at the right time do not have access to basic civic services that are a prerequisite for them to cross borders, access healthcare, apply for a job or education, rent a home, etc. A digital research identity solution can plug and play with upcoming systems such as the EU Self Sovereign Identity (SSI) framework and provide a verifiable credential to allow migrants and displaced persons to present proof of identity and receive social services while participating in research critical to understand and identify issues within specific marginalized groups. 

If we receive funding, we will leverage our team's experience in international humanitarian aid and activism to partner with the UN Global Pulse to launch a data quest following migrant workers, granting them with a digital identity and providing a source of income to support their journey while collecting valuable data for public policy organizations serving this population.

Opscientia is building a platform that empowers global citizens to become meaningful stakeholders in the process of scientific discovery and knowledge creation. We are closing the digital inclusion gap through a digital identity system that grants participants ownership of their data as well as the opportunity to earn yield on their data as a liquid asset deployed on decentralized finance protocols.

There has never been a solution like this before that simultaneously tackles the inclusion problems in scientific research, the lack of meaningful public engagement with the process of scientific discovery, and the tapping of latent human capital to fuel engines of knowledge creation. 

For the first time, ordinary citizens can engage in public discourse with scientists and collectively decide the priority for scientific enterprise to address imminent challenges that align with the community.

Opscientia's solution significantly advances the infrastructure for deploying privacy-preserving machine learning pipelines for reproducibility in scientific discovery. Our integration with the Ocean Protocol allows the monetization of data science models, providing researchers with the ability to capture the value of their insights while maintaining confidentiality of personal data sets. 

Our solution addresses several key problems holding back the next wave of innovation in AI. 

1. We're refining an incentive structure that promotes secure data sharing and provides an opportunity to earn by creating models that solve pertinent analytic challenges in our decentralized science ecosystem
2. Our platform establishes interoperability standards by encouraging researchers to optimize their workflows to serve data consumers and generate royalty fees for on-demand computation
3. Confidential computing allow encrypted cloud sessions to grab secure personal data from IPFS, run a machine-learning analysis, and make the final results available to the requestor without ever revealing the data. This way individuals keep their data secure but others can leverage it to perform useful analyses!
4. Automation of scientific discovery process will generate rich metadata, the next untapped treasure trove for data science, to train the next generation of A.I algorithms that can produce hypotheses, test them, and deploy reproducible workflows

Opscientia is building a decentralized autonomous organization for science; powered by public block chains, bleeding-edge advancements in decentralized finance, key-pair cryptography, and peer-to-peer protocols.

We have introduced the term DeSci, decentralized science, to the Web 3.0 community and established a fledgling following; where we promote the fruits of knowledge creation as a public good.

Our platform that empowers global citizens to become meaningful stakeholders in the process of scientific discovery and knowledge creation, while furthering the adoption of cryptocurrency principles such as self-sovereignty. 

We are closing the digital inclusion gap through a digital identity system that grants participants ownership of their data as well as the opportunity to earn yield on their data as a liquid asset deployed on decentralized finance protocols.

There has never been a solution like this before that simultaneously tackles the inclusion problems in scientific research, the lack of meaningful public engagement with the process of scientific discovery, and the tapping of latent human capital to fuel engines of knowledge creation. 

For the first time, ordinary citizens can engage in public discourse with scientists and collectively decide the priority for scientific enterprise to address imminent challenges that align with the community.